In 2006 the journal English Teaching,영어교육, published a paper by Dr. Kang entitled Cross-linguistic Impact of Parental Reading Behavior on Children's English. The research reported in that paper complements Dr. Kang's earlier findings as to the crucial importance of voluntary reading in English for facilitating the acquisition of English as a second language (for details, see his 2003 USC doctoral dissertation: “The Effects of Heritage Language Use and Free Voluntary Reading in English on the Acquisition of Academic English by Korean American Students.” In 1998 An article written by Dr. Kang entitled “The Relationship between Korean Language Achievement and the Acquisition of English” was published in Donga (동아일보), and an article on a closely related topic was published in Chosun(조선일보); both are major newspapers in Korea. Dr. Kang’s book “English for Travelers” was published in Korea by Jun Won in 1995.
English Teaching, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring 2006
Free Voluntary Reading: Cross-linguistic Impact of Parental Reading Behavior on Children’s English*
Yul Kang
(University of Southern California )
Many studies have shown that 1) the benefits of reading, especially free voluntary reading (FVR) include enabling children to acquire academic language regardless of whether they are learning their first language (L1) or a second language (L2); and 2) children’s attitudes toward FVR are strongly influenced by home environmental factors. However, hardly any of the latter studies have dealt with cross-linguistic situations. This paper reports the results of two empirical studies: the first study measures the extent to which the reading habits of Korean-born parents influence the reading habits of their American-born children, and the second measures the effect of the amount of reading done by the children on their acquisition of academic English. The results of the first study show that the L1 reading habits of Korean parents are a strong indicator of their children’s L2 reading habits, where the amount of reading done in each case was measured by scores on title recognition tests: titles of modern Korean literature for the parents, and titles of English literature for their children. The results of the second study show that the children’s FVR habits, as measured by their title recognition scores, are a strong predictor of their scores on the language portion of a Stanford 9 exam. Thus, these results jointly imply that the culture of literacy fostered by the parents’ modeling of reading behavior at home has an important, albeit indirect, impact on their children’s academic English achievement.
I. 
INTRODUCTION
Reading is generally considered to be one of the foundational aspects of language learning. Reading because you want to, also known as pleasure reading, is “one of the most powerful tools we have in language education” (Krashen, 1993, pp. x, 1). This applies to both first and second language learning. Recently the effect of the home environment on children’s reading achievement has become a matter of widespread concern. Perhaps as a result of new distracting activities like Internet chatting and cyber games being added to an older distraction like television (Nagy, 1997), children nowadays appear to be less interested in reading books and may have little or no motivation to do so (Moser & Morrison, 1998). While numerous factors have been shown to foster reading motivation in children (Ediger, 2001), I will focus on those relating to the home environment, especially the effect of parental modeling on their children’s motivation to read. By way of introduction to this topic, I shall briefly summarize recent treatments of language acquisition and of the ways in which reading facilitates that process.
II. 
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
We acquire complex knowledge of the structure of our first language automatically by engaging in natural meaningful communication, as Ellis (1994) has noted. Yet even linguists have not succeeded in giving a fully explicit description of this knowledge. By way of illustration, Ellis proposes: “[A]sk a young child how to form a plural and she says she does not know; ask her ‘here is a wug, here is another wug, what have you got?’ and she is able to reply, ‘two wugs’” (Ellis, 1994, p. 2). Even though the child was not explicitly aware of the grammatical rules governing inflectional morphemes, she was still able to respond correctly.
Krashen (1981, 1983) views observations of this sort as evidence that language is acquired by understanding what is said or written, not how it is said or written. Invoking the Language Acquisition Device (hereafter LAD) originally postulated by Chomsky (1965, 1980), Krashen argues that a person “ … does not simply acquire what he hears [or reads]—there is a significant contribution of the … [LAD which] … itself generates possible rules according to innate procedures … . Moreover, not all comprehended input reaches the LAD” (1985, pp. 2, 3), an effect that Krashen accounts for by postulating an affective filter—a kind of mental block: “When … [the filter] is ‘up’, [e.g.] when the acquirer is unmotivated, lacking in self-confidence, when he is ‘on the defensive’ … he may understand what he hears and reads, but the input will not reach the LAD. …The filter is down when the acquirer is not concerned with the possibility of failure in language acquisition. … [It] is lowest when the acquirer is so involved in the message that he temporarily ‘forgets’ he is … reading ” (1985, pp. 3-4). This sort of ‘forgetting’ is likely to occur when a person is reading something he chose because of his interest in its topic, i.e. when his reading is done voluntarily.
III. FREE VOLUNTARY READING
Especially in contexts relating to school policies, Krashen uses ‘free voluntary reading’ (hereafter FVR) as a preferred synonym of ‘pleasure reading’. Here ‘free’ means that the reading matter is not assigned, and ‘voluntary’ signifies that the reader personally selects the reading matter and undertakes to read it of his own free will. A good example of FVR is a child reading the “Harry Potter” series or “Spiderman” comics under the covers with a flashlight. Krashen advocates FVR as the best method for providing ‘comprehensible input’3 to facilitate language acquisition.
Why does Krashen place so much emphasis on the need for reading to be voluntary? One reason he gives is that students who are allowed to choose reading material according to their own interests “ … will tend to read in areas they are familiar with” (1985, p. 77), thus will tend to have an abundance of background knowledge that will facilitate their comprehension of written material in those areas. More particularly, this background knowledge will often enable children to make accurate guesses as to the meaning of words and constructions that are new to them, leading to their acquisition of those items.4 “…[D]eep involvement in any topic will provide exposure to a tremendous amount of syntax and vocabulary used in other domains” (Krashen, 1985, pp. 73-74).
There is a closely related reason for the effectiveness of FVR in facilitating language acquisition that does not seem to have been mentioned explicitly by Krashen or anyone else. When a person encounters in his/her reading an example of an element of the language that s/he has not yet acquired, s/he has to put forth extra mental effort to infer the meaning from its context, from already acquired elements of the language5, and from his/her background knowledge. Under FVR conditions, what motivates the reader to put forth that extra effort will typically be his/her interest in grasping the message conveyed by the passage in question, an intrinsic motivation insofar as that interest was what led him/her to freely choose the text in the first place.
Another reason for Krashen’s emphasis on the need for reading to be voluntary is implied by his Pleasure Hypothesis: “ …[T]hose activities that are good for language acquisition are usually perceived by acquirers as pleasant, while those activities that are not good for language acquisition are not consistently perceived as pleasant, and are, in fact, often perceived to be painful” (Krashen, 1994, p. 299). Many of the studies providing empirical support for the Pleasure Hypothesis show more particularly that “free reading outside of school is pleasant” (Krashen, 1994, p. 308). That result is fully consonant with voluntary reading being an intrinsically motivated activity, as was noted in the preceding paragraph, given that intrinsic motivation is associated with greater pleasure than extrinsic motivation (Stipek, 1993).
IV. EFFICACY OF FVR
Many research studies have shown that FVR enables children to make significantly greater progress in first and second language development than programs emphasizing structured, systematic instruction in the target language. For example, after reviewing the results of in-school free reading programs (specifically, programs in which part of the school day is set aside for FVR and for direct instruction in the first language), Krashen concluded: “… [W]hen free reading and direct or traditional instruction are compared in method comparison studies, free reading nearly always proves to be superior on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and grammar” (1993, p. 19). Elley (1991) reached a similar conclusion after reviewing nine studies of second language (hereafter L2) acquisition. In these latter studies the results of book-based programs where students followed their own interests in choosing books and read them at their own pace were compared in detail with the results of structured systematic instruction in L2. Elley (1991) concluded that the children in the book-based programs typically showed significant gains in most of the language skills tested—which included grammar, writing, oral language, etc. as well as reading comprehension—over those subjected to structured systematic instruction.
V. HOME ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
“Reading begins at home” is an adage that is generally accepted by educators and researchers. Most parents recognize how important it is for their children to begin acquiring reading and writing skills before beginning kindergarten (Olson & Logan, 1989). Parental involvement in the reading process actually begins long before the child arrives at school and continues throughout the school years (Vukelich, 1984; Hughes, 1999).
Parentally controlled home environmental factors that have been strongly recommended by scholars to help hesitant readers increase their interest in reading include: literacy interaction (i.e., reading aloud, tutoring and sharing literature), providing a rich print environment, parental attitudes toward reading, and parental modeling of reading (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985; Routman, 1991; Trelease, 1995). Parental modeling in a cross-linguistic milieu, i.e., one where the parents speak a different language from the one in which their children are being instructed in school, was chosen as the focus of this study primarily for the following reason: In a cross-linguistic milieu a more accurate measurement of the efficacy of parental role-modeling as readers can be obtained than in a monolingual milieu because parents who have a poor command of English are unable to provide encouragement in the form of tutoring, reading aloud, or answering questions their children may have about material they are reading in English. Moreover, such parents typically will not provide a print environment rich in English material. Thus only two of the four parentally controlled home environmental factors listed above tend to be operative in a cross-linguistic milieu. Furthermore, those two factors are likely to be closely interlinked at least in cases where the parents do a lot of reading at home: in such cases it is likely that they have a positive attitude as to the value and importance of reading. Finally, while the effect of home environmental factors on children’s reading attitudes and behavior has been studied very extensively in monolingual situations, hardly any studies of the effect of those factors in cross-linguistic situations have been published.6
The cross-linguistic milieu examined in the present study is the Korean-American community in the Greater Los Angeles Area. This is the third largest immigrant community in the United States; its center is a district in the City of Los Angeles called Koreatown that has at least 400,000 ethnic Korean residents. The community is served by two daily Korean-language newspapers, four Korean-language television channels, and a large number of Korean commercial establishments, including 70 Korean bookstores. These resources not only provide ready access to Korean literature and cultural artifacts but also allow people who speak only Korean to satisfy their daily needs.
VI. METHOD
1. Hypotheses
The present study tests the following two hypotheses:
1) The more reading that Korean-American parents do at home in their native language, the better they serve as models of reading behavior for their children (despite language differences). This in turn stimulates their children to do more FVR in English7.
2) The more FVR that Korean-American children do in English, the greater their achievement in Academic English, as measured by their scores on the language portion of the Stanford 9 Test.
2. Subjects
The subjects for this study were 99 American-born children and 99 Korean-American parents (for each child, the parent or other Korean-Amerucan adult closest to the child—typically the child’s mother—was chosen as a subject). The criteria for inclusion in the study were as follows: 1) that all subjects reside in or near Glendale,8 California; 2) that all students currently attend 6th or 7th grade classes at a public school; and 3) that their parents subscribe to a Korean-language newspaper rather than to an English-language newspaper. Generally, Koreans who live in Glendale are middle class and well educated; in consequence, their socio-economic status is sufficiently controlled for the purposes of this study.
3. Materials
For measuring parental FVR, a list of 30 best-selling titles of modern Korean literature was compiled, to which 20 fictitious titles were added. For measuring the children’s FVR, a list of titles of modern English-American literature was constructed by asking 50 6th grade honor students from California towns outside Glendale to list twenty of their favorite books. The titles of the 30 books occurring most frequently on those lists that typically are not recommended by the Department of Education were used in the test, along with 20 fictitious titles.9 This test was used to measure the amount of reading done outside of school. Title recognition required both students and parents to identify which titles are actual works of literature. For measuring the children’s academic English achievement, an excerpt of the language portion of a Stanford 9 basic skills exam10 was selected.
4. Procedure
Researchers studying reading behavior have found that when subjects are asked to estimate how much reading they do, they tend to exaggerate the amount (Beech, 1990). The title recognition tests used in this study not only avoid that defect but also can be answered quickly by subjects.
1) The title recognition test for Korean literature was given to the mother of a Korean-American student except in cases where the student was not living with his mother; in those cases the test was given to whichever Korean-speaking adult was closest to the student, typically his father.
2) The title recognition test for English-American literature was given to 6th and 7th grade Korean-American students.
3) The score assigned to each test was computed by subtracting the percentage of fictitious titles checked from the percentage of genuine titles checked; in cases where this difference was a negative number, a score of zero was assigned.
4) The scores on (1) and (2) were analyzed for linear correlations to see whether the amount of parental FVR in Korean influenced the amount of their children’s FVR in English.
5) An excerpt of the language portion of a Stanford 9 basic skills exam (hereafter English Stanford 9) was given to the 6th and 7th grade Korean-American students.
6) The scores on 2) and 5) were analyzed for linear correlations to see whether the amount of FVR by the students affected their academic English achievement as measured by their performance on English Stanford 9.
5. Results
Figure 1 below shows that parental FVR in Korean is a strong indicator of their children’s FVR in English, as measured by their respective title recognition scores (hereafter TRS). In Table 1 the results of further statistical analysis are presented: parental FVR in Korean as the independent variable explains 57% of the variation in the children’s FVR in English, and this result is confirmed by the F-test (p<.001).
FIGURE 1
Relationship between TRS’s of Parents and Children Derived by Simple Regression
Figure 2 below shows that children’s FVR in English as measured by their TRS’s is a strong predictor of their English Stanford 9 scores. In Table 1 the results of further statistical analysis are presented: children’s TRS’s as the independent variable explains no less than 72% of the variation in the children’s English Stanford 9 scores, and this result is confirmed by the F-test (p<.001).
FIGURE 2
Relationship between Children’s TRS’s and Their English
Stanford 9 Scores Derived by Simple Regression
TABLE 1
Simple Regression Summary
Child TRS Stanford 9
r2 beta t ( p); r2 beta t ( p)
.57 .736 10.7 (<.001) - - -
Child TRS - - - .72 .85 15.8 (<.001)
VII. GENERAL DISCUSSION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The culture of literacy (especially as manifested by reading behavior) that is provided by the parents, despite their linguistic differences vis-à-vis their children, influences their children’s attitudes towards reading, which in turn largely determine the children’s FVR habits. Undoubtedly children’s attitudes toward reading are also influenced by their school experiences, not least by their teachers’ modeling of reading behavior (Morrow, 1982). From a wider perspective, the habit of reading can be seen as one of many cognitive activities that, as Vygotsky (1978) pointed out, are initially experienced in interactive settings and later adopted by children to form part of their own repertoire of skills.
FIGURE 3
Model of Overt and Covert Processes Underlying the Acquisition of Academic English
The finding that the amount of FVR done by Korean-American 6th and 7th grade students, as measured by their title recognition scores, explains 72% of the variation in their English Stanford 9 scores, is very striking. Once again FVR has proved to be an important resource for fostering academic English achievement. By way of summarizing the main themes of this article, Figure 3 presents a schematic model of the contributions of parental reading behavior and their children’s FVR to the children’s acquisition of academic English.
Globalization has given members of the human race closer contact with each other, with the result that non-English speakers now have greater opportunities to interact with English speakers. However, as long as opportunities for English interaction continue to be limited in many countries, including Korea, reading is likely to serve as the principal source of English input. This, in turn, suggests that it would be valuable to further investigate the impact that FVR in English has on learning English as a foreign language in Korea. A finding that free voluntary reading in English has a strongly positive effect on learning English in Korea could revolutionize the teaching of English in Korea.
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Yul Kang
Montclair College Preparatory School
Van Nuys, California 91402 USA
Doctoral Candidate, University of Southern California
MS in TESL, University of Southern California
BA in Linguistics, University of Southern California
P. O. Box 4253, Glendale, CA 91222
USA: 213-384-5000; Kr: 017-235-5678; email: kang@usc.edu
Free Voluntary Reading: Cross-linguistic Impact of Parental Reading Behavior on Children’s English*
